Danny has lived his 18 years locked in his house in the middle of the forest. After his mother's death, his father became obsessed with protecting him from an outside world filled with, he claimed, dangerous monsters. The boy grows up surrounded by old music and movies and full of fears of a world he does not know. But when his father dies and his aunt takes care of him, Danny will be forced to interact with other people and go out into a real world where he will discover that monsters do exist, but they do not look as he thought.
Somewhere Boy (available on Filmin) is a complicated series to classify. It is a hard story but with a luminous, dramatic but hopeful tone, a fable in a very real and painful world. It's even a thriller when Danny is determined to find out what happened to his mother. "I would describe the series as a very dark emotional rollercoaster, where everyone is an outsider, everyone is constantly discovering things," describes Lewis Gribben (Glasgow, 27 years old), the actor who puts a face to the protagonist. "Danny is an outsider because he's literally never been out. In the end it is a drama of self-discovery in which he has to acclimatize to the world we know."
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One of the aspects that highlights the critics of this series, and which they described as one of the best dramas of 2022, is, precisely, the interpretation of Gribben, which gives fragility to a character with which it would have been easy to fall into caricature and exaggeration. The story moves, through temporal jumps, between the present in which Danny learns to manage in the real world helped by his aunt and, above all, a cousin of the same age, and different moments of his childhood through which the viewer understands the emotional drama and trauma with which he has lived since he was very small. "Danny is like a baby discovering the world for the first time. He's very innocent, but at the same time, he's determined to find out what happened to his mother," says the actor.
Lewis Gribben and Samuel Bottomley, who plays his cousin, in an image from 'Somewhere Boy'. Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC Studios/Cl
Despite the special and strange situation that the series shows, Gribben describes the story as the drama that could occur in any family. In fiction, the young man's aunt wonders several times how she could have allowed something like this to happen to her nephew and not have detected the warning signals launched by her brother. "One of the things that makes the script of Somewhere Boy so unique is that its characters are so firmly tied to the earth, to reality. They are characters in which you can see yourself reflected," the actor said in a video interview on Monday.
"I know the feeling of wanting to belong to something, of wanting to feel connected. Danny's is an extreme version, but we've all been through those problems in life, a lot of people try to self-discover even if you're 28. A lot of people in this world are extraordinary and have to deal with the ordinary, which is very complicated," says the actor. Gribben knows what it's like to feel like an outsider in this world, and he brought all of that to the character. He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and became accustomed to living by creating his own imaginary worlds. "In a normal school, I went to a special unit, with other children with disabilities. I've felt that feeling of being disconnected from the environment where everyone is. Then the kids went to parties and events and I didn't like it. That isolation and, at the same time, that desire to be included in the group that is described in the series I have lived, and that's why I think in the series it seems more real."
Rory Keenan and the boy Samuel McKenna, on the set of 'Somewhere Boy'.
Shortly after finding himself fully in a world unknown to him, Danny decides it's time to explore it, go for a walk alone, go to parties, surf the internet, make friends and even experiment with sex. And, above all, to discover the truth about the monster that took his mother from him. In those moments of exploration of the world is where the light of this story and the connection with their relatives comes in. For Gribben, going from the drama and harshness of certain moments to those flashes of humor wasn't complicated. "You just had to look for the truth of each moment, to make them seem as real as possible, what anyone in such a situation would do. I worked with the directors to make sure every moment the character lived felt deep, from the lightest moments to the darkest."
Mental health is another of the topics that Somewhere Boy puts on the table and at its center, not only because of the situation in which Danny finds himself, but also because of the one his father is going through. Gribben stresses the importance of mental health being present in television and film. "I think, especially in men, it's not been covered enough on TV, and when it's done it's usually in the form of psychosis. Somewhere Boy shows the reality of how annoyed a young person can be, tries to gauge what society can mean for many young men and women, who do not feel comfortable with themselves, so they have to change certain things. We need shows like this to show that vulnerability and for those people who feel disconnected from big-budget action movies or the very sexualized image of men and women that TV and movies show."
Two words that both critics and Lewis Gribben repeat when talking about Somewhere Boy are unique and special. But what makes this series so unique and so special? Its protagonist tries to answer: "It's so unique because... Well, it's not violent, it's not a crime drama, there's no gangsters or gangs, there's no utopian world. It is something almost unattainable within normal life. They are stories that happen, even if we don't hear about them. There are so many people and so many families who go through situations of violence, depression, sadness... People can't be disconnected from other people," says the actor. "In this story, the extraordinary is the ordinary, and that's what I think makes it different."
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